Robert Winter

BIOGRAPHY
Scholar/pianist/media author ROBERT WINTER earned a B.A. from Brown University, an M.F.A. in Piano from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and a Ph. D. in the History & Theory of Music from the University of Chicago. He spent 1972-74 in Europe on Fulbright-Hayes and Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation fellowships researching his doctoral work on the sketches for Beethoven's String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, Op. 131. A member of the UCLA music faculty since 1974, he served as Chair of the Music Department in 1992-93.

In the past fifteen years of his scholarly career, Winter authored, co-authored, or edited four major books on Beethoven and published a substantial number of inþuential articles on compositional process, performance practice, and Franz Schubert (he contributed the Schubert article to the new 2000 edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians). The Beethoven Sketchbooks (with Douglas Johnson and Alan Tyson, published by the University of California Press) received the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society for the best scholarly music book of 1985. Winter's other awards and honors in that same period included a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983 and, in 1990, the Frances Densmore Prize (for the best article on musical instruments between 1986-89) from the American Musical Instrument Association. He also served a term as an elected member of the American Musicological Society's Board of Directors.

From 1979 on, Winter became widely known to the general musical public for his nationally broadcast 10-week live-music series on Mozart and Beethoven (with the Sequoia Quartet) for American Public Radio, as well as programs in the series Pacific Coast Highway. His audiences for countless live performances and lectures covering a vast range of musical and cultural topics from Josquin to jazz have included the national meetings of the American Symphony Orchestra League, Avery Fisher Hall (New York Philharmonic) and the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center, the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center, the Cleveland Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the 92nd Street Y, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver, B.C., the Opera League of Los Angeles, numerous summer music festivals (including nine seasons directing a sold-out summer concert series at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California), and a host of colleges and universities. He has served as official and unofficial coach of numerous string quartets, chamber ensembles, and opera productions. Writing for the Wall Street Journal in 1993, Mark Swed described Winter as "probably the best public explicator of music since Leonard Bernstein."

In 1989 Winter's career took a dramatic turn when he was invited by Bob Stein of the Voyager Company to produce its Þrst original interactive software title-today widely regarded as the first commercial interactive publication. As an instinctively multimedia performer and author, Winter's programs on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (called "masterly" by the New York Times); Mozart's "Dissonant" Quartet, and Dvorak's New World Symphony have been hailed in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, U.S. News and World Report, Newsweek (where he was profiled as one of "50 to Watch" in cyberspace), People Magazine, Wired Magazine, and elsewhere as milestones in multimedia publishing.

In addition to his interactive creating and authoring, Winter has become an articulate international spokesperson for the role of content and the arts in a digital world. He has been a featured or keynote speaker/performer at many professional conferences, including the Microsoft CD-ROM Conference, Digital World, Stuart Alsop's Agenda '90, the UCLA Multimedia Roundtable, the Japanese National Audio-Visual Conference in Tokyo, MacWorld Expos in the United States and Mexico, Milia (Cannes, France), Intermedia (San Francisco), the Governor's Conference on the Arts & Technology (Santa Clara), Chamber Music America, and the Ziff Institute. He also recorded a live video music series for RCA Victor that was launched with three titles in February 1995. From 1996-2004 he led for the national organization Arts Presenters (based in Washington, D.C.) an annual week-long seminar for arts presenters at Aspen and La Jolla entitled "Classical Connections" that explored broad humanist issues related to understanding and programming classical music. Most recently Winter was named to occupy the Presidential Chair in Music and Interactive Arts-the Þrst such chair to be awarded in the arts at UCLA. From 1996-2000 he was the Founder/Director of UCLA's Center for the Digital Arts. During this same period he also served as Associate Dean for Technology and Curricular Innovation in the School of the Arts & Architecture.

As President of Calliope, a multimedia publishing company devoted to originally authored programs in the arts, humanities, and entertainment, Mr. Winter authored or produced numerous titles-from "Robert Winter's Crazy for Ragtime" (released in May 1996; "Robert Winter has done it again." Newsweek) to "Interactive Perlman" (a program exploring Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto with renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman) that have continued to receive wide critical acclaim. He was the recipient with Joseph Horowitz of an NEH grant to vastly expand his earlier program on Dvorák and the New World into an interactive DVD (the first of its kind) that will appear in the fall of 2006. In 2003 he was recruited by Carnegie Hall to help spearhead their new digital outreach programs. The first project, a second interactive DVD for Winter and his collaborator Peter Bogdanoff, joined forces with the world renowned Emerson String Quartet in an interactive Performer's Guide to the Bartók Quartets, which Carnegie Hall launched as an internet website in June of 2006. With pending projects employing handhelds and exploring reform of the ossified music curriculum, Winter continues to push new media frontiers.